Sounds Without Borders: New Music, Hybrid Languages and the Futures of Listening

Abstract Deadline: August 15^th (Abstract Length: 400–600 words)
Editor: Paolo Tortiglione
Publisher: Pietà dei Turchini Edizioni (https://www.turchini.it/en/turchini-edizioni/)

Collection Abstract

This collection offers a wide-ranging examination of new music through the lens of cultural hybridity and global sonic exchange, bringing together scholars working across musicology, ethnomusicology, composition, performance studies, and cultural theory. By examining the points where musical traditions dissolve, merge, and reinvent one another, the volume will illuminate how composers, performers, and listeners are reshaping the very languages of music in an interconnected world.

Purpose

Over the past several decades, the boundaries separating Western art music, non-Western traditions, electronic music, and popular forms have grown increasingly porous. Composers and performers today move fluidly across notation systems, vocal techniques, rhythmic languages, and sonic technologies drawn from radically different cultural contexts. Yet the theoretical and analytical frameworks available to scholars have struggled to keep pace with the creative realities of this global musical hybridity.

This edited and prefaced volume seeks to explore how new music participates in processes of cultural translation, sonic border-crossing, and the emergence of hybrid musical languages. From the archaic vocal textures resurfacing in contemporary composition to the electroacoustic reimagining of ritual and sacred sound; from percussion traditions migrating across continents to the music born in the spaces of urban diaspora, these practices challenge received categories of genre, origin, and authenticity.

The goal of this collection is to bring together musicologists, theorists, performers, composers from related disciplines (cultural studies, sound studies, urban studies, postcolonial theory) to examine how new music mediates relationships between cultures, bodies, technologies, and places.

We welcome historically grounded studies as well as theoretically informed analyses and practice-based perspectives.

Possible Topics may include, but are not limited to:

The Dissolving Score

• Graphic scores and visual music across cultures
• Oral transmission and memory in art music
• AI-generated and open-form notation as hybrid language

Voices in Between

• Post-bel canto and world vocal fusion
• Archaic vocal techniques in contemporary performance
• Code-switching and multilingualism as musical expression

The Electric Sacred

• Electroacoustic music in ritual and spiritual traditions
• Field recording as ethnographic and artistic act
• The drone as universal meditative language

Rhythm as Language

• African, Asian, and Latin American polyrhythm in Western contemporary music
• Percussion traditions crossing cultural and aesthetic borders
• Body percussion and physical music theatre

The Composed City

• Urban soundscapes and the music of migration
• Sound art in multicultural metropolitan spaces
• Street music and diaspora as avant-garde practice

Various additional topics

• Jazz and improvised music and their relationship with contemporary composition
• Traditional and folk music reworked in a contemporary key
• Microtonality and non-Western tuning systems
• Silence and noise as border aesthetic categories
• The body and performance between dance, music theatre, and composition (see above alternative in Rhythm and Language section)
• Spirituality and the sacred in border music
• Film and incidental music as laboratories of fusion

Submission Guidelines

Please submit:

• A 400-600 word abstract
• A brief bio (150-200 words)
• Institutional affiliation (if applicable)

Send submissions to: paolo.tortiglione@sanpietroamajella.cloud (as well for additional details or general info)

Abstract Deadline: August  15^th
Notification of Acceptance: August 30^th  
Chapter Draft for Editorial Feedback: November 30^th  
Full Chapter Length 5,000–7,000 words (including notes and bibliography), following MLA Style  (notes and bibliography – https://www.balamand.edu.lb/Library/Research/Documents/Manuals/MLAStyle.pdf)